[G Tablet Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] MJW:
Long missive below, so fair warning – I have put in as much detail as I can remember to help out troubleshooting and I have read every thread on APX mode I can find both on this board and others.

I’ve gone and done it now, my GTab formerly running VEGAn-Tab 5.1.1 is stuck booting only to APX mode. So what did I do, and what have I tried?

* Immediately after purchase, I loaded ClockworkMod .8, then VEGAn 5.1.1. Absolutely no issues.

* Started looking into the various kernels, decided to try Clemsyn’s since it seemed to support VPN’s without any hassle (I don’t have any Linux experience, so to me moving module files around is a hassle). It worked great, my VPN to home worked. I successfully upgraded several times to his Version5 without any problems.

* Loaded a ton of apps, the vast majority worked just fine. I loaded App2SD, and moved most of the larger apps to the SD card. I also I think moved LauncherPro to the SD Card, which caused minor problems later.

* Inserted a 512MB USB stick. It worked. However when the GTab rebooted with it in, I received a ton of FC’s for apps loaded to the SD Card that load on startup, including LauncherPro. I can’t remember what exactly I did to fix that, I remember somehow getting the regular launcher to load, then uninstalling LauncherPro and a ton of other apps. Reloaded those but didn’t move them to the SD Card. Everything back to normal.

* Decided I wanted a boot screen other than the birds, so I made one following the instructions in that thread. Like everyone else, my graphic failed on partition 6 but worked on partition 7. No problems after that.

* Yesterday I inserted a 4GB USB stick. It didn’t work. Rather stupidly based on my earlier experience with the 512, but confident I could fix anything that broke, I rebooted the machine with the stick still inserted. As expected, a ton of FC’s, this time though the apps were not loaded on the SD Card. Not good. I also could not get into the regular launcher to uninstall things. No problem, I was planning to switch to the Gingerbread edition of VEGAn anyway. I force rebooted (held the power button down about 10 seconds).

* The GTab came back to life in APX mode. Not good, but not fatal either. I downloaded NVFlash and the Win7 x64 drivers, I had no problem connecting the GTab and my laptop. Now feeling a little better, but still annoyed.

* Read the “[STICKY][ROM] nvflash FULL restore, using bekit's original image (Instructions)” thread on recovery backward and forwards twice to make sure I understood what I was doing. Came to the conclusion that all I needed to do at this point is unzip the two files (one with NVFlash, the other with the stock images) into one subdirectory, and run the .bat file. I did that, watched NVFlash create and format about 10 subdirectories, then load the images to them. NVFlash reported success, and my GTab rebooted into stock TnT. The usual FC’s on bootup, after chasing those away, I enabled WIfi, and let it download the latest firmware – 3588. It asked to install, I said yes. It asked to reboot I said yes. It rebooted into APX mode.

* Now I am really annoyed, this isn’t supposed to happen, though I did find I think 2 guys that are stuck in APX mode, looks like one returned his, the other leaves it on a dock and does not touch it. I don’t have the dock, I don’t like the stock TnT, and since I ordered the custom carbon fiber backing sticker and the “android eating the apple” sticker and they look great on the back I am not in favor of returning it at this time.

* So I spent another couple of hours on the web reading. I read the “[UTILITY] G-Tablet Format” thread on formatting the device, I downloaded that zip file, it looks much like the regular NVFlash recovery process. Actually exactly the same, but it looks like the .img files are different and the NVFlash file is different. It ran, and said it was successful. The GTab rebooted, and said I think “Magic number mismatch”. I rebooted again, expecting to see a magic number error, which would give me the greenlight to go into NVFlash Recovery mode, but failure - right back into APX mode. I wanted to do try the format and then restore to stock process back to back, but it seems that the machine has to reboot after any NVFlash action. Right back to APX mode, NVFlash to stock worked the same as before, loaded then APX mode on reboot.

* I tried using NVFlash to stock but adding CWM .8 on partition 9. No difference, right back to APX mode, no chance to get CWM to load. I read that using a single command to push only CWM to partition 9, then while holding down the plus sign pushing the image. That actually worked, it rebooted into CWM. Everything seemed to work as expected, I could mount the system and data directories, format them, reformat the SDCard, change it’s size to 2048/0. I tried wiping the DELVIK cache, it returned an error saying a file existed but then said it was successful. I don’t remember what it said when I did that the very first time when loading VEGAn 5.1.1, so that might be the expected behavior. Either way, I rebooted and right back to APX mode.

* I read somewhere that flashing CWM to partition 10 worked. I swapped around .img files so that it was pushed to 10 instead of 9. Upon reboot, it went straight to CWM. I had the same experience as before, upon reboot after that it went to APX mode instead of back to CWM.

* I popped the back off and tried booting while shorting out the 4 pins, no change, though I could get to APX mode anyway so I wasn’t expecting a miracle. The button next to those 4 pins didn’t make a difference either.

* I tried booting while holding down the vol- button, and again with both the vol- and + being held down. Neither worked.

* I downloaded the SDK to try ADB mode. It made me download the Java DK, no problem. The SDK does not see the JDK, but I didn’t reboot the laptop, since I was still in #Tegratab (thanks BadFrog for your help). I will do that when I get home and get ADB to work, but I don’t know what to do when I get that done. ADB works, I needed to load the 32 bit version of the JDK, even though I have an x64 machine. ADB works, so I am happy. Now to see if that helps the overall problem.

* I did after booting into CWM load VEGAn Gingerbread and Clemsyn’s GB Beta 2 kernel. After next rebooting into APX mode, I pushed CWM to partition 9, and it tried booting into GB but never got past the animated GB screen. I will try that again later today with 5.1.1 and the Ver5 kernel and see if it makes any difference. I can probably live with it booting into APX mode if I can push CWM to Par9 and get it to boot back into 5.1.1 when needed. z4root didn't help either.

* So in conclusion, I am stuck in APX mode no matter what I tried. I think it is partition related, because of the problems after inserting the USB sticks, and since it will reboot after NVFlash into whatever seems to be in partition 10. In the DOS world that is easy to fix, especially when doing a system wipe and rebuild. I tried using NVFlash to say partition 10 is the boot partition, that didn’t work, NVFlash actually didn’t seem to do anything and I had to do a CTRL-C to end it.

Any suggestions, other than peel my stickers off and mail it back to Amazon.com?

* 1239CET 25 Mar 11 - Edited, I tried z4root, it didn't help my problem.

* 1345CET 25 Mar 11 - ADB now working. Win7x64 Ult.

* 1725CET 26 Mar 11 - Unit RMA'd to Amazon - I was on day 30 so off it went, the replacement just shipped so they will cross in the mail.